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Liberal Saudi Web Forum Founder Sentenced To 600 Lashes and 7 Years In Prison
cold fjord writes "Some reformers travel a harder road than others. The Seattle Times reports, 'The founder of a liberal-minded website in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes after angering Islamic authorities in the ultraconservative kingdom. ... Raif Badawi, through his website known as Free Saudi Liberals, had urged Saudis to share opinions about the role of religion in the country, which follows a strict form of Islam that includes harsh punishments for challenging customs. A judge in the Red Sea port of Jiddah imposed the sentences but dropped charges of apostasy, which could have brought a death sentence, the Al-Watan newspaper reported. Badawi has been held since June 2012.' More at details are available at the BBC, which informs us that 'The judge ordered that the 600 lashes be administered 150 at a time.' 'The lashes could be spread out but in Sharia this is a sign that the judge wants to insult him,' Badawi's lawyer said."
Good thing we are still friendly with this nation who is a shining beacon of freedom.
Remember this when you get an urge to say that America and Western society is oppressive, and when you decide that Islam is a peaceful religion.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
As much as I love bitching about the issues that we have here in America, seeing what happens in shitholes like Saudi Arabia makes me feel really lucky to have been born here.
The Flaming Liberal, clearly he got what he deserves... 600 lashes and 7 years in prison will definitely change his mind and reform him about those wrong-headed ideas that the blessed Shariah Law-abiding Conservatives of Saudi Arabia are not too punative or quick to deal out harsh rulings.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Yet another prime example of why alien civilizations won't contact us openly: How can a truly civilized race possibly take us as anything other than animals when we still do things like this? Our so-called "civilization" is just as thin a patina over the animal underneath as our neo-cortex is over the rest of our brains. It's positively heartbreaking to read of things like this in this day and age when I know that the human race, at it's best, is in such stark contrast with such senseless ignorance and brutality.
No, I'm not joking, and I'm not trolling either; this is really how I feel about this, and I don't care if anyone likes it or not.
Bracing for being flamed all the way down to "-1, Troll" for daring to speak my mind, which ironically enough will prove my point for me better than I can prove it myself.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Sure. There are zero good cultures in the ME, so pitting one variety of Muslim against the other is the most efficient way to (help) maintain the divisions and schismatic violence which they love so well and practiced long before tasty oil made it necessary to deal with them.
We must have energy, cheap energy, and since much of that energy comes from our cultural enemies the situation requires careful, amoral manipulation.
When dealing with beasts, choose the most useful. The Wahabis are brutal and nasty, but they need a military edge against their Persian enemies who are also infected with the same superstition. As long as they are enemies, at least one side needs the EUSian oil consumers as clients.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
No, they buy their WMDs from us.
The Iranians are building nukes since they saw what not having them meant for Saddam. If you want to go down that road there is another country in that region that has nukes no one is allowed to inspect, often unilaterally attacks its neighbors and is running a brutal occupation in ways that violates international agreements including using tactics like collective punishment. For some reason we are best buds with them too.
Either that or they want to torture him before dying.
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when you have to use laws to keep people from questioning how it's practiced.
Be seeing you...
The Republican party doesn't want to coddle minorities because it believes that minorities are just as capable as the majority, and believes that introducing dependence perpetuates problems. The Democrats want to keep dependency going because they get to harvest votes (instead of the cotton they used to get). Yes, this is surprising news to you that the *Republicans* believe in true equality regardless of race - but that is the history if you care to look.
The sad thing is that I think you've actually convinced yourself of that. That the political parties are now as they have always been, and that the Republicans are still the "Party of Lincoln."
No, if you really look at the history, you see people like Strom Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party to become Republicans in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You see Nixon and the Southern strategy. As Kevin Phillips, Nixon's political strategist said at the time:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
The mid 20th century was a transition time in which the Democrats split over the issue of segregation v. equality. Thurmond's Dixiecrats feuded with the rising liberalism in the party, and the end result was that most Southern Democrats were replaced with equally racist Southern Republicans -- at least the ones that didn't just switch parties themselves. It would be the Republican party that would squeeze out its pro-equality members over the next few decades, not the Democrats. As LBJ is said to have told an aide upon signing the Civil Rights Act, ""We have lost the South for a generation." It was the Democrats who made the political sacrifice to do what's right on race. And it was the Republicans who made the cold, amoral decision to pander to racists to gain their votes.
Although it was then-Democrat George Wallace who first linked popularized the connection between racist policies and states rights, it was Republican Barry Goldwater who ran with the idea and became the first Republican candidate to win the South with Reconstruction. Nixon's subsequent campaign on "states rights" and "law and order," all under the guidance of Harry S. Dent, was well understood by Southerners to mean support for racially biased policies. As Lee Atwater said:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me â" because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
The only reason Republicans pretend to care today is beca
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